In 1995, Harmonix Music Systems was founded as a video game development company with the mission to “give music-loving non-musicians—the millions of passionate air-guitarists in the world—[a chance] to play music” (Stone, D, GameCritics.com, published Mar. 31, 2004). Harmonix is responsible for Rock Band® and the original Guitar Hero® games, two titles in a profitable and popular genre of video games that allows even musical novices to create music as they play. The success of those games, says co-founder Alex Rigopulos, owes to the fact that playing music is “one of the most fundamentally joyful experiences that life has to offer.”
As Rigopulos's phrasing suggests, games like Guitar Hero do not aim to train the player as a bona fide musician, but only to simulate the experience of music-making for the player's satisfaction. The painstaking practice required to learn to play music “the old-fashioned way” are frustrating and prohibitive, he argues. However, dedicated players of Guitar Hero may devote as much time and effort to practicing their USB instruments as traditional musicians do to practicing their real ones. Some players are able to “play” entire songs from memory, without the visual cues of the game, and even without hearing the accompanying parts. Unfortunately, even if these skills are as impressive and as difficult to attain as real musical talent, they can never be applied to a real instrument. Mastery of a five-button guitar simply does not translate to six strings.
Considering the piano as one example, becoming instrumentally proficient usually requires significant resources. Barriers to achieving proficiency include time, the cost of owning or accessing the instrument, possible cognitive and/or developmental barriers of would-be players, and the availability and expense of skilled teachers. A significant challenge for any novice instrumentalist is the need to mentally map traditional musical notation to the keys of the instrument. In the case of a standard-format piano, this imposes a major hurdle: for every musical notation element presented to the novice player, she or he must determine which of the 88 keys to depress, when to depress them, and for how long.
A number of solutions have been developed in an attempt to ease this burden on the novice player. For example, Casio Europe GmbH manufactures and sells electronic keyboards with lighted keyboard guidance systems in which keys illuminate to indicate which of the keys the player should depress. However, in this system, the user receives little forewarning of necessary key depression, rendering the player to a “reactive” state rather than allowing him or her to adjust hand position and/or fingering to accommodate upcoming note sequences.
U.S. Pat. No. 3,958,487, herein incorporated by reference in its entirety, presents a system for external illumination of keys by a series of light-emitting elements, while U.S. Pat. No. 6,407,324, herein incorporated by reference in its entirety, presents a system in which a frame bearing key-illuminating LEDs is mounted over a piano keyboard. Each of these systems share the problem of the Casio system of being “reactive” to the light cue. In addition, these systems can be cumbersome to implement and difficult to retro-fit to existing keyboards.
Popular music video games such as the aforementioned Guitar Hero® and Rock Band® games allow simulated instrumental play, and provide advance visual cues for which notes should be played and when the notes should be played, but these systems have not been capable of incorporating piano keyboards into the gaming system due to the complexities involved, e.g., in accommodating of a number of keys typically found on a piano, or even a sufficiently large subset of the keys to provide satisfying game play. By way of contrast, typical guitar-mimicking game controllers require five or fewer input buttons.
There are instructional systems geared for use with full size keyboards, such as Synthesia and Piano Wizard® (U.S. Pat. No. 7,174,510 and U.S. patent application Ser. No. 11/411,835; each herein incorporated by reference in its entirety). The instructional systems use a computer to provide visual cues for the notes that are to be played on a keyboard, and they do not require the user to read traditional musical notation. However, as these systems do not provide alignment of the visual cues to the physical keyboard on which the player plays, they still require mental mapping of these graphical elements to instrumental keys. Several of these systems also require the use of a proprietary keyboard or other input devices.
Music games like the Guitar Hero® game represent an improvement over those songbooks in that they frame the task as a game, and are able to give the player visual feedback on her performance and reward good playing. This approach appeals particularly to children and other users who are accustomed to a video gaming mindset, which entails points, goals, and achievements. In the Guitar Hero game, visual cues on the game display indicate which note or notes (buttons on the input device) are to be “played”. The visual cues appear at a starting position on the display and advance toward a predetermined second position on the display, and the notes are played when the cues reach the second position. In this fashion, the player has advanced warning of which notes to play, the level of difficulty of the game can be easily and incrementally increased by presenting more and/or faster visual cues. However, in order for these games to be intuitive and enjoyable, they sacrifice the mapping between the game instrument and the real instrument it represents. For example, a player who masters the guitar-shaped game controller used in the Guitar Hero game will not, based only on skills acquired from the game, be able to play a real electric guitar.
The Synthesia training described system above uses a system of advance visual cues similar to the Guitar Hero game, and also incorporates a standard piano keyboard. In the Synthesia system, a sequence of dots and dashes scrolls downward over and in alignment with an image of a keyboard on a computer screen, to indicate which keys the user must press (and for how long) on a piano keyboard attached to the same computer. The player is scored on the accuracy and timing of her key presses. While this scrolling note approach is the similar to that used in Guitar Hero, the onscreen keyboard is not scaled to a real keyboard. In the Synthesia system implementation, the user must visually trace each of the advancing notes down one of the many keys of the onscreen keyboard. Because the image of the keyboard onscreen is not the same size as a real keyboard (i.e., it is generally much smaller, so as to fit on the screen) and because there is no actual physical or visual alignment between the onscreen keyboard and the keyboard device played by the player, the user must then locate the correct key on the physical keyboard without any visual reference point that is apparent to a musical novice. This hunt-and-peck process proves too time-consuming to allow novices to play at a normal pace.
The present invention comprises a novel musical game, focused on the piano keyboard, with the unique benefit of preparing users to play music on real piano or other similar keyboard instrument. The game is designed to be compelling to musicians and novices alike, and can be implemented with standard keyboard and display hardware.